Aesthetic ideology

In the tractate titled The Coming Insurrection in English, anonymous French authors summarized what centuries of intellectual thought have achieved: the tautology «I am what I am».[i]

This
depressing conclusion has some truth to it. Tautologies like this as well as
others such as «it is what it is», «so ist es», «так и есть» are commonplace in
the modern-day world. It is a radical simplification of life. Forget trying
to grapple with complex questions, inchoate ideas and our position in relation to
them. Just conclude that «I am what I am» or «it is what it is».

There
are many reasons for this development: the limited intellectual faculties of
people, stress, the increasing complexity of the modern world, technology, as
well as perception shaped by seemingly innocuous, accepted, mainstream media narratives and the societal consensus
established around them and ostensibly supported by (pseudo)science.

While
this book will examine this last point in detail (see chapter 5), our main concern
is to understand the enormous disconnect between wide segments of the
population and the prevailing discourse, particularly in Western countries defined by what we call pragmatism. To narrow
this gap, we need to rethink our conception of life, diversity,
tolerance, goals, success and nearly all our values, not to change or
overhaul our own personal «system», but to allow for and accept different ones.

By
pursuing this goal, we may be able to create a framework in which individuals
overwhelmed by complexity no longer fall back on meaningless tautologies, but
seek out information and perspectives aligned with their own Weltanschauung,
when they are looking to deepen their understanding, or, in contrast, would
like to gain insight into others.

To
achieve this openness, however, we must acknowledge that the myth preserved
since liberal publications worked to reveal the lies related to the Vietnam War
is dead. If it was ever the case, mainstream newspapers and media are not engaged in comprehensive truth or an
objective understanding of reality today. Their individual reports are based on
events or observations, but, taken as a whole in their broader context, the
media around the world have become an extension of one or another political
party, usually broken down along the lines of the so-called left and right. As
such, they have turned into a mechanism of propaganda. To gain exposure to the
truth in an unbiased context, we have to look elsewhere today. That place is
none other than … literary fiction.

Not
only does literary fiction, especially
the classics, not function as the arm of a political party, but it also has the
potential to act as a counterweight to the one aspect shared by Western media on both the left and right and preventing
above all a diverse understanding of life: materialism. The universal
promulgation of materialism, irrespective of political orientation, has
isolated everyone who has failed by materialist standards – the bulk of
populaces in every country in the world. Furthermore, we are fed the impression
that no other alternatives exist.

¿Are we being tricked? ¿If so, what are the reasons for
this and what is an alternative?

For
centuries, humanity has (rightfully) sought to improve the standard of living for all. The improvement has focused on
distributing material wealth to an ever-larger group of people.

Unfortunately,
this pursuit has also entailed the stigmatization of those with less material
wealth. For reasons we will discuss below, the media and, as a result, society in pragmatically defined countries accept political differences,
but fundamentally reject tolerance for non-materialist worldviews. This
approach may be good for increasing prosperity, but it results in the
aforementioned tautologies, the frustration of wide segments of the unrepresented population,
and confusion regarding the truth.

This
book will attempt to provide a framework for understanding, essentially telling
in an expository manner, what we find shown in literary fiction, especially
the classics. It is based heavily on empirical findings in three countries:
America, Germany and Russia.

It
is not under any circumstances a work of science.

We
have adopted an artistic approach to the hypothesis that there is a fundamental
difference between romantics and pragmatists that can be overlaid with a scale of material
wealth on one end (for pragmatists primarily) and metaphysical/spiritual wealth on the other (for romantics on the
whole). The reasoning behind this hypothesis is based on the now popular
interdisciplinary approach, but does not restrict itself to two disciplines.
The causes for a phenomenon are found in many fields, as literature has long
known and demonstrated. Trained in English, German and Russian literary classics and having survived so far
with this understanding of life, we have
adopted what will be called the artistic method to explain being at the start
of the new millennium.

Artistic
theory requires ideal types. They allow abstraction and facilitate
generalization so it is possible to understand life. Any
development of new hypotheses must draw on or at least be contiguous with
contemporary or past work, as Julie Gebke aptly puts in her book on
discrimination in early modern Spain: «Changes or even a revolution within the
disciplines are therefore only possible if the new ideas are adapted to the
prevailing discourse and expressed within its narrative frame of reference. New
ideas, by contrast, which use an alternative to the prevailing discourse are
not accepted by the professional public.» (Gebke, 25)

Perhaps
it began for Whittlesey with George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss. Maybe it
started in the home of affluent parents and the society of school with other
pupils bused in from the worst neighborhoods in the city. Certainly, it
crystalized in hyper-pragmatic parents and romantic in-laws no less extreme. For Friedrich, it was
dramatized by ETA Hoffmann’s Der
goldene Topf (TheGolden Pot): Her experience in an extremely
romantic family embedded in a pragmatic context caused her to
unconsciously feel the tension between her family life on the one hand and school, university and
society on the other. For Smirnov, there was Leo
Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina revealing the urban-rural bifurcation that he still saw 150 years
later. And then, when he came to America, he encountered a different duality in
person: the confrontation between the culture of his upbringing and the West.

The
idealism of youth, the experience of witnessing every state of being in the
prototypical poles of romantic and pragmatic cultures, resulted in the transposition of life. This means
that being is equated despite widely differing worldviews – with everyone
enjoying certain advantages and disadvantages.

In
her philosophical essay on why the failure of thinking causes us to continue
thinking, Julia Wentzlaff argues that pure notional work is accompanied by
failure, but this leads not to resignation, but rather to a more in-depth
examination. (Wentzlaff 2018) She describes human beings as subjects doomed to
fail in their thinking. Thinking is a
person’s claim to describing something objectively. This doom does not mean that they should stop
thinking, however. Rather, we will continue to think and should continue to
think precisely because of this failure: The failure is the affirmation of life.

What
Wentzlaff says in complex philosophical terms, the romantic knows by nature: They are
likely doomed to material failure, but will not let this doom drive them to
despair. On the
contrary, such a materially-doomed romantic will embrace life all the more – only a different side of it:
the metaphysical or spiritual.